Of Mice and Men: The Problems with Studying Mice to Learn about Men

Every day throughout the world, scientists are scurrying around their labs, studying mice. They don’t just study mice, like you would study a book, or observe a brook. They devour the mice, chewing them up into organs, tissues, cells, and molecules, as they hunger for ways to better detect and treat human disease. Each stab in the mouse is a stab in the dark, but it gets grants and patents and awards. It feeds the greedy drug companies whose shareholders want new breakthroughs and new revenue.

But why mice? Of all the creatures to use as surrogate humans, why choose these small, furry, four-legged, relatively short-lived species to represent Homo sapiens? Is there something special about rodents in general, since rats and guinea pigs are used too, that make rodent research the optimal model for human medicine?

To be fair, researchers also use monkeys if they can. Dogs are also a favorite species to exploit, as are cats. So it would be wrong to say they just pick on rodents. It’s just that rodents cost less, and people don’t usually care about them.

Of course, humans would be the best subjects for human-disease experimentation. But the human can perform an act no other species can. They can sue and collect for damages. And while there have been many instances of unethical research being forced on people, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, or, more recently, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccination experiment, people can make more of a stink than a cage of dead rats. So the path of least resistance, politically speaking, is to abuse mice and not men.

First, you have to create human-like disease in mice. One way is to genetically-engineer mice with certain genetic mutations. Some of these mutated mice develop diseases that affect their little bodies in ways that seem to mimic human disease. It is hoped by these mouse researchers that their results will translate into human relevance, leading to more grant money to cure human disease.

For example, rodents have been genetically-engineered to develop mammary tumors. To these scientists, a tumor is a tumor, no matter how it got there or what species it is in, so they equate these man-made mouse mammary tumors with breast cancer in human women.

Another example is engineering mice to make tau protein in their brains, which is considered similar to tau protein found in the brains of some Alzheimer’s patients. The mice with these proteins seem to be less mentally acute, according to the scientists, which makes them think this is a good model for Alzheimer’s.

Every human disease is studied by first trying to create an animal model. We project all our human diseases onto these poor creatures. We study rats to learn about how the human mind works. We study mice to learn about depression, fear, and addiction. We assume these animals are like people, but treat them like animals, without the respect for their life or liberty or feelings or needs. We simultaneously humanize and depersonalize them. They are treated like automobile crash dummies.

Besides the obvious moral problem in treating animals like dummies, it takes a dummy to think that the results of rodent research will help treat human disease. That’s because you can never know whether the results are relevant to humans until after you experiment on humans.

Making the leap from mouse to man requires you overlook some important and fundamental differences between these species. Mice in nature live 6-18 months, if they are lucky. As pets, they can live up to 2 years. Humans live up to 100 years, plus.

Does this mean that a one-year old mouse is equal to a 50-year-old human? Do mice age in one month as much as a human ages in 100 months (8 1/2 years)? Such comparisons are absurd. This makes longevity studies on mice an exercise in wasting research funds.

When drug or other treatment studies are done on mice, the long-term impacts are never known, since the mice are usually killed for the study. Even if kept alive for the few days or months remaining of their lives, you cannot predict the decades-long impacts on a human from the months-long experience of a mouse.

And if anyone tried to look at rodents and compare their anatomy to that of a human, there are some significant differences. But the significance of any differences will not be known until you study humans.

All of this has so far ignored the elephant in the room, which is that mice, rats, and other rodents do not live like humans. Most of our diseases are lifestyle related, and we humans have a thing called a culture that affects every aspect of our lives. The culture also makes us do stupid things, like wear tight clothing that interferes with circulation. We eat synthetic food, wear synthetic fabrics, breathe synthetic chemical pollution, live in plastic homes, bathe ourselves in electromagnetic radiation, pump drugs throughout our bodies, and have become alienated from our nature as humans and from the natural world in which we evolved. We are artificial creatures, products of our own cultural making. What species can you use for comparison?

You cannot understand human disease without understanding that humans create their own disease by the way they live. We can’t study that in mice. Their “culture” consists of whatever the lab technician gives them in their cage, including processed food and water. They are removed from nature, placed in a human-defined world where they can be studied. What happens when you shock them, or poison them, or give them a crack in the head, or burn them? Let’s see…

And here is where you can learn about human nature. Only humans do experiments on others. You will never find a mouse doing vivisection on a human. Causing suffering to innocent creatures in the name of self-preservation is a purely human trait.

Of course, not all humans are sociopaths or psychopaths who make a living torturing mice for their research career. Humans, like mice, have the ability to feel empathy. When a loved one is harmed, both humans and mice comfort the afflicted. But if you look at how scientists study empathy in mice, it will reveal a great deal about humans.

For example, there is a 2018 study in the journal, Brain and Behavior, entitled, Empathic behavior according to the state of others in mice. As the study explains,

“Empathy is the ability to understand what other individuals feel and to share that feeling. Empathy is important for social animals. Historically, empathy has been thought to be a high‐level cognitive process. However, Darwin already indicated numerous examples of empathy and sympathy in animal species. In recent years, empathic and sympathetic behaviors have been reported in nonhuman primates and rodents; it is therefore becoming clear that many nonhuman animals also have empathy.”

To study this empathy in mice, the scientists did this:

“In order to observe empathy‐like behavior in mice, we investigated for the first time whether there was preference toward conspecifics who were in distress. We examined whether cage‐mate and stranger mice would recognize the state of conspecifics and engage in empathic behavior; recognizing that a conspecific is in distress is important for avoiding harm and providing assistance.

“Three types of mice were utilized in this study: tail‐pinched, formalin‐injected, and anesthetized mice. We examined whether test mice would show social preference toward these treated mice compared to control mice. The tail‐pinch method has been used to investigate pain stimulation responses caused by mechanical noxious stimuli. The formalin test is used to cause inflammatory pain by injecting formalin into the hind limbs of mice. As these pain‐testing methods are visually evaluated by a human observer, the test mice in this study could also reliably determine that the treated mouse was in a pain state using visual cues.”

Why do this study? The scientists explain:

“The emotional transmission of pain between mice has been reported in many studies, but its transmission mechanism remains unclear. Clarifying these issues may lead to the elucidation of the mechanism by which humans share emotions, leading in turn to the development of more efficacious treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders…If this method is established, empathic behavior can be easily investigated using neuropsychiatric disorder model mice.”

Let’s summarize this study. Scientists with no empathy for mice studied mice to see if they have empathy for other mice. They confirmed that mice have empathy, which they studied by harming some mice and seeing if the unharmed mice cared. They did care. What does that tell us about human neuropsychiatric disorders?

Actually, it tells us a lot. These scientists, and the journal editors who approved this article, are suffering from psychopathy. Some may have been born normal but learned to ignore the suffering of the mice, making them sociopaths, instead of psychopaths, who are born that way. We can study these psychiatric conditions by examining their behaviors towards these mice. They lacked empathy, and showed a willingness to deliberately cause harm and suffering to someone else for one’s own purposes. That’s what a psychopath does.

A mentally healthy person would cringe at the thought of hurting mice to see how other mice react. It’s like thoughtless, cruel children who pull wings off of flies or legs off of ants to see what happens, except these are not children, and they received grants to do this.

Part of the problem is that there are no alternatives to this animal cruelty. The current dogma in medicine is that animal research must be performed before human research. It may be cruel, and it may mislead, but it needs to be done on non-human guinea pigs before it is done to humans. This is a false sense of security, since you never know what will happen to humans until you test it on humans.

The big question is how the medical system can continue to abuse animals this way and continue receiving grants to do so. If we want ethical medical care, then we need ethical medical research. Psychopathy is a slippery slope, as history has shown. For those who worry about medical abuse, the way mice are treated by medicine is the canary in the coal mine. There is no real difference between mice and men for a psychopath.

This means that animal research is more than a waste of resources. It is a threat to humanity, or at least to the part of humanity that knows better and tries to be kind to animals.

Of course, this issue is complex. Humans also eat animals (although mice are not usually on the menu), and use them in labor. And many people consider rodents to be pests, and kill them with poisons, traps, and other means. Subjecting these animals to experimentation, it is argued by psychopaths, is no worse than eating them, or exploiting them in other ways. By this rationalizing, eating an egg is the same as cutting off a monkey’s head and sewing it back on to another monkey’s body, to try developing a method for human head transplants. (I’m not making this up. See this.)

Our goal in medical research should be to create a healthier humanity. You cannot do this with animal studies, which assume a false equivalence between humans and non-humans, and which are conducted by psychopaths. Do you want the people who can do these things to animals to be the leaders of medical research?

What happens when human medicine is built on non-human research? Where is the human element of culture? Where is the logic in this false equivalence? Why is this anachronism of 18th century medicine still the gold standard for 21st century medicine?

We will reap what we sow. There is a reason why so many people are sick, and why medical science is failing us. Good cannot come from evil.